Year 5 - Starbright

Welcome back to school - I hope that you all had a relaxing and enjoyable Easter break.

This half term we start our new topic 'Beast Creator' where we will be looking closely at minibeasts, their habitats and their role within the world around us. We started our learning by going on a minibeast hunt around the school grounds - have a look at some of our pictures below.

Beast Creator - Minibeast hunting!

FA Skills Coaching - Spring Term

Sports Relief class photo

Spring Term 1

What a busy, interesting and fun first half to the Spring Term we have had! The children have really enjoyed the ‘Scream Machine’ topic producing some brilliant poetry based on fairground rides and in Science, investigating how different fairground rides rely on forces to operate.

We have also had our first Cross Curricular Book week where all of our learning was based upon the Michael Morpurgo book ‘Kensuke’s Kingdom’. The children were given the opportunity to produce some beautiful oil pastel work based on the Japanese artist Hokusai and we even had a go at some origami.

In English, we have been working collaboratively with Year 6 on the narrative poem ‘The Highwayman’ by Alfred Noyes. This beautiful, descriptive poem tells the tragic story of a highwayman and his true love Bess and the children have used this as a basis to produce some fabulous writing.

Spring Term 2

This half term sees us start a new topic entitled 'Off with her Head' which is all about the reign of the Tudors.

To continue with the Tudor theme, in English we shall be studying 'Macbeth' by William Shakespeare before starting some more collaborative learning on film narrative with Year 6.

Finally in Maths, although not Tudor-themed, we shall be looking at written methods for multiplication before moving on to division.

Origami pictures

It is hard to believe that the first half term has come and gone! Starbright had a fabulous time at the National Space Centre, Leicester and were successful in completing their mission to 'Rendezvous with a Comet'. The problem solving activities that the children completed really did give them first-hand experience of what it could be like to work for a space agency.

The children have also had the opportunity to build their own rockets. They had to carefully plan the design for their rocket, taking into consideration aesthetics, aerodynamics and durability to survive the launch and then we launched their spacecraft on the first day back of this half term. Have a look at the videos to see how successful they were.

This half term we have been really busy learning about Space - we have found out the names of and studied the eight planets, made our own sundials to track the rotation of the Earth, discovered lots about the moon and also researched individuals throughout history who have made a significant contribution to this field.

We are very excited to have been selected as one of 10,000 schools to participate in the Royal Horticultural Society School Gardening ‘Rocket Science’ experiment which will contribute to the RHS’s knowledge of growing plants in space.

Two kilograms of rocket seeds were launched on board Soyuz 44S on 2nd September 2015 with European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Andreas Mogensen and his crew, arriving on the International Space Station (ISS) two days later. After being held for six months in microgravity, the seeds will be returned to Earth with astronaut Scott Kelly, currently planned for March 2016.

Once the seeds have returned they will be distributed to participating schools who will each receive 100 seeds that have been on the ISS and 100 seeds that have remained on Earth. The seed packets will be colour coded, however schools will not be told which packet contains which seeds until national results have been published.

After participating in a classroom experiment in May and June 2016, pupils will be asked to enter their results in a bespoke microsite so that results from schools across the nation can be collated and analysed by professional biostatisticians.

The RHS have sent us a video which shows the rocket launch containing our seeds and we are also able to track the route of the ISS through a website managed by NASA.

In addition, we are really looking forward to our visit to the National Space Centre in October where we will be taking part in our own space mission 'Rendezvous with a comet'.